Dark City Light City

Michèle Roberts and Carol Robertson both live in London. They choose walking as a metaphor for their journey towards exploring the differences between writer and artist. Words and images walk towards one another. With London as their muse they set about mapping and comparing how each sees the city, hears it, imagines it; what each pays attention to and finds significant.

Roberts, a poet and novelist, has been describing London strolls in her diary for thirty years; her chance encounters with Londoners. In this book she becomes the invisible flaneuse, writing down street-talk and overheard conversations, mobile phone monologues, brief exchanges with passers-by. She eavesdrops on dark stories and innocent chatter, loops from voice to voice, from place to place.

Robertson is an abstract painter. She selects walks more formally, planning her routes and recording each walk with a camera. She gathers a kaleidoscope of visual details, some of which later become encapsulated into paintings. The duration of a walk is distilled as a sensory experience: freeze-frame equivalents of painted colour and light, intense optical rhythms of multicoloured circles and stripes.

A conversation between images and text emerges.

Retail Price £12.00

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